Student Debt Linked to Worse Health and Less Wealth; Those with over $50,000 in debt have lower well-being than debt-free peers.
Byline: Andrew Dugan and Stephanie Kafka
Synopsis: Americans who graduated college between 1990 and 2014 and took out over $50,000 in student loan debt are less likely to have thriving well-being than their fellow graduates who did not take out student loans.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- College graduates who carry a high amount of student debt appear to face long-term challenges that stretch beyond just their finances. A new analysis of Americans who graduated college between 1990 and 2014 shows that graduates who took on the highest amounts of student debt, $50,000 or more, are less likely than their fellow graduates who did not borrow for college to be thriving in four of five elements of well-being: purpose, financial, community, and physical.
Although graduates with no student loan debt are slightly more likely than their indebted peers to be thriving socially, the differences are not statistically significant.
Gallup finds the starkest differences among these groups in the areas of financial and physical well-being. Higher debt signifies lower likelihood of thriving in these two areas of well-being. Graduates who went the deepest into debt to obtain their college degree, for instance, are far less likely to be thriving than graduates who took out no debt, by 15 percentage points in financial well-being and 10 points in physical well-being. The pattern is similar for graduates' sense of purpose, although those who borrowed over $50,000 are just as likely to be thriving in this element as those who borrowed $25,001 to $50,000. The relationship is less straightforward for graduates' community well-being, though again, graduates who took on the most debt for their degree are less likely to be thriving in this element than those who did not take out any loans for their undergraduate education.
These results are based on the inaugural Gallup-Purdue Index, a joint-research effort with Purdue University and Lumina Foundation to study the relationship between the college experience and college graduates' lives. The Gallup-Purdue Index is a comprehensive, nationally representative study of U.S. college graduates with Internet access. According to a 2013 Census Bureau report, 90% of college graduates in the U.S. have access to the Internet. This analysis is based on a Web study conducted Feb. 4-March 7, 2014, with more than 11,000 adults who graduated college between 1990 and 2014.
Using the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the Gallup-Purdue Index measures key outcomes to determine whether college graduates have good lives. The Well-Being Index is organized into five elements of well-being:
Gallup classifies those who respond, at the element level, as "thriving" (well-being that is strong and consistent), "struggling" (well-being that is moderate or inconsistent), or "suffering" (well-being that is low and inconsistent).
The student loan debt figures this analysis uses are reported...
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